when you are engulfed in flames
by nathan-p
Summary: Post-Nevermore. Max makes a choice between abandoning her right-hand-man and joining the rest of her family in the vault. Sappy Fax. 2 of 3 in a series.


_So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't want to leave the Congo, oh-no-no-no-no-no_

_Bingle, bangle, bungle, I'm so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go_

_Don't want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords, I make it clear_

_(That no matter how they coax him) _

_I'll stay right here_

* * *

I gotta say, sunset over the ocean is pretty spectacular. In the E-shaped house it was interrupted by the mountains, but on an island in the middle of the Pacific, you can see the sun go all the way to the horizon, a little fiery circle distorted as it merges into its own reflection.

Today the sunset was blood-red, every cloud painted a different shade of carmine, the sun a tiny blur of orange.

It was sure pretty, I tell you.

I heard footsteps on the dock and didn't turn to see who it was.

"Dylan," I said. Fang was in a mood the past couple days, and I hadn't seen him since sunrise that particular day. Not that Dylan was any better company - he mostly lurked in the remaining buildings, and didn't come outside much.

"How do you _do_ that," he said, and came to sit next to me, swinging his legs out to dangle over the water.

"What, like it's hard?" I shrugged. "Me and you two are the only people outside, and since it wasn't Fang it was you."

He drummed on the dock a little. "I actually came to talk to you about that."

"If it's Fang I'm pushing you in."

He laughed. "No, the outside thing."

"You're gonna stay inside forever? I would _not_ mind."

He ignored me. "No. I've been talking to Dr. Martinez and... she wanted me to tell you some stuff."

"Yeah? Does she have satellite reception yet?" Some kind of electromagnetic interference had knocked all that out a few days after we arrived on the island. Last I heard Dr. Martinez wasn't sure just what had caused it or when it would stop.

Not that I really minded. You don't need Internet access to know when the world is ending.

"She wants to talk to you."

I rolled my eyes. A couple days ago I would've pushed him in and yelled "Tell her no!" after him, but I was getting kind of bored with just sitting around eating food from cans and occasionally going for a flight. And not talking to Fang.

"Fine. Like, today, or 'whenever I have time'?"

He kicked his legs back and forth. "She said to just put her on hold and come get you."

"Great." I kind of wanted to just sit and watch the sunset. The whole saving-the-world gig hadn't left a lot of time for just sitting, and now that that was over with, I had all the time in the world. "Did she say what it was about?"

"She wanted to tell you herself." He shifted from side to side, making the planks creak.

I sighed and took one last look at the sun before pulling myself up to stand. "Fine. Let's go."

I started walking towards the little block of buildings, ready to get this over with, but he ran after me, and I turned around to see what he wanted. _I_ wanted this over with as quickly as possible.

"She wants to talk to Fang too."

The look on my face must've been eloquent, because he added hastily:

"Not at the same time. Just... you know, send him over when you see him?"

"You can hunt him down yourself if she wants to talk to him so bad," I snapped, and walked faster towards the little concrete bunker.

We'd deactivated the decontamination showers after a week being trapped topside, so I stormed right through the airlock without stopping, making a beeline through the rooms and corridors to the terminal where we talked to Dr. Martinez.

Me and Fang were having some differences of opinion lately and it made him damn hard to talk to. I was getting sick of canned food and not much to do, even if it _was_ really pretty.

He, on the other hand, was in heaven. Every time we talked it was "finally alone" this and "no more people" that and it was starting to wear on me.

I slipped into the chair by the terminal and entered the code to re-activate it. It seemed pretty unnecessary to me, but given this had apparently been a military bunker, maybe it had once made sense to only allow certain people to use this terminal. Now it just made it hard to talk to people.

There was a pop and some static - some of the complex had been refurbished a few years ago, but the further back you went, the older the technology got, and the terminal was a big beige box that was possibly older than me - and Dr. Martinez's face blurred into view.

"_Max? Is that you?_" She sounded staticky and distant, which was par for the course.

"I heard you wanted to talk to me." I deliberately didn't look at the camera mounted in the wall that allowed her to see and hear me. The red eye reminded me too much of _2001: A Space Odyssey._ "How's life in the vault?"

"_Everyone seems to be settling in fine. I wish we had more adults down here, but what can you do?"_ She smiled. Her hair seemed to have gotten a lot greyer since she went into the vault, but it was probably just the crappy resolution of the camera.

"We're not exactly adults, but you could invite us in." We'd been unconscious and trapped outside when the vault doors closed. Dr. Martinez had said as soon as we made contact that she was arguing with the overseer and council about letting us in, but she hadn't said anything about that since then.

"_That's actually part of what I wanted to talk to you about._"

"What, did you get them to let us in?"

"_Not exactly._" She frowned. Static popped and fizzed as she sat there, obviously thinking of words for something. There was a deep line between her eyebrows. "_Max, I called you here because I'm picking up some very odd readings on telemetry._"

"You got some of the satellites back?" _That_ would be news.

"_No. From the weather buoys. Radio signal isn't great, but I'm getting enough back that I thought I should tell you what we're seeing._" She looked down at something on the desk, twiddled a pencil between her fingers, and looked back up. "_Until now fallout clouds have mostly stayed put over the continents and primary impact sites. Your exposure has been minimal because of that. You __have__ been taking your iodine, right?_"

"Yep." OK, maybe not in a few days. And the supply she'd sent up for Fang hadn't been touched.

Dylan was, of course, taking his religiously.

"_Good._" She drummed the pencil on the table. "_But I wanted to talk to you about what I'm seeing from the weather buoys. They're picking up increased wind activity in our direction from South America._" She looked down again, like she was reading something off a printout. "_The first clouds of any real size will reach us in about a week if wind speed stays steady. Could be a little sooner._"

"Yeah, and?"

"_Those are clouds of fallout, Max._" She looked back up at the camera. Her reading glasses looked incongrous on her face. "_Projections are that, even to you, they could have some pretty bad effects if you stay topside. That's why I wanted to talk._"

"So what do you want me to do? I mean, unless you talked the council into letting us come down..." They had been fighting her pretty hard when she first broached the issue _because_ they thought we might be contaminated by radiation already. She thought it was nothing serious and that if it was we'd already be dead, but they were taking no chances with their precious vault.

"_That's the thing. When I brought up the telemetry to them, they unanimously agreed that you should have the option to come into the vault for at __least__ six months._"

"What's the catch?" There was definitely a catch. They wouldn't have changed their minds if there wasn't.

"_You'd have to come down in the next two days or not at all. They want you down here undergoing full decontamination well before the clouds actually get here._"

"Fair enough." Full decontamination procedures would last a long time and apparently involved a lot of sitting around bored with an IV in your arm, which was _not_ something I looked forward to, but having a guaranteed shelter from radioactive fallout would be a huge plus. And other people to talk to - much as I liked Fang (most of the time) and tolerated Dylan, I was kind of getting sick of talking only to them every day. "Why six months?"

"_They estimate that by the end of that time most harmful fallout will have dropped to earth. After that, iodine should be more than enough to deal with any remaining radiation you may encounter._" She looked into the camera, and even through the visual static she looked worried. "_You need to make a decision fast, Max. If you don't come down in the next couple of days, I can't guarantee the council will let you down at all. And I can't guarantee how bad the cloud will be when it gets here, either. If you ask me I'd prefer you come down here __now__."_

"That's a problem. I mean, I'd love to come." Not really a lie - at the least, they would have fresh fruit from the arboretums in a few weeks, and I was _really_ tired of eating out of cans and bags. On the other hand it'd mean giving up the freedom we had up here. "But I don't know if Fang wants to come."

"_And you won't come without him_."

As much as he annoyed me sometimes, I couldn't. He was my right-hand man, and while I was learning to let him do his own thing sometimes, I knew that without him to rely on as backup, I'd feel like half of myself. It was tough to explain that to people without them assuming that it was a purely romantic relationship. "No, ma'am."

"_I understand._" She took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "_I'll do what I can to support you if you choose to remain up there, but I - the council might keep me from interfering if you do. I think they'll let me keep talking to you, but they may not let me send anything up for you. You'd be on your own. Do you understand that?_"

"Sure do." The air conditioning was nice after the sweltering day, but my skin was already starting to itch. Maybe I was just a _little_ nervous about the possibility of losing Fang, too.

"_Then talk to Fang, and make your decision._ _Contact me again when you have. I have the system set to buzz me when you open the channel, no matter what time it is._"

I had no idea where to find him, for one thing, but I didn't think she wanted to hear that. "Anything else?"

"_Yes. I have a message for Fang from- from before the bombs fell. I can send it up there if you don't come into the vault, but that terminal may not be able to decrypt it correctly. When you talk to Fang, tell him that and to give me a call._" She looked away from the camera, towards where I assumed the door was. "_I should go. We're having another council meeting about the arboretums and they want me there._"

"OK." Frankly I was glad to get this conversation over with already. "Can you send up some of those spaghetti MREs when you get a chance? I am _so tired_ of shit on a shingle."

"_Of course. There's twice as many of them in our stores as any other flavor. I doubt anyone will miss them_." She looked at the door again. Maybe someone was standing there waiting for her. "_OK. I'm going to go. Call me back when you've made a decision._"

"Will do."

Her image fizzed and irised out, leaving the black screen, and after a moment the camera's red eye winked out too. I hated having that thing watching me.

"You done yet?" I heard footsteps from the hallway, and then Dylan peered around the doorframe.

"Were you just _waiting_ out there?"

"Uh." He looked at the ceiling tiles, avoiding my stare of disbelief. "No. I had dinner. You were talking for a really long time."

That was less creepy. "If you ate the last chicken fajita in the box, I'm gonna throw you in the ocean." I meant it, too. They were slightly less crappy than every other MRE we'd worked our way through, and when you're eating MREs almost exclusively to get enough calories, taste is important.

"I left that one for you." He grinned. "I _did_ eat the last spaghetti, though."

The little jerk. Looking for Fang could wait.

"You _ate my food_!"

He was already running, but once we got outside he couldn't beat me in the air.

* * *

Fang was sitting under a rock overhang by a cliff face where a waterfall fell into a little pool. He was sitting folded-up with his knees under his chin, looking blankly into the forest. A worn black backpack was sitting next to him, the zipper of the main pocket partially unzipped.

I dropped in next to him, swearing and rubbing at a scrape on my left wing. "How did you get _in_ here? That overhang nearly took my head off on the landing."

"I hiked." When he raised his arm and pointed, what had looked like impenetrable jungle from the air suddenly revealed a relatively passable path leading away from the pool and downhill.

"Oh."

He shrugged. "Dr. Martinez says I need to walk more until my wing heals all the way. So I walked."

"You talked to her today?"

"No. On Friday we talked for a couple minutes. Why?"

I sat down next to him on a relatively flat section of rock. "She wants to talk to you about some stuff. There was kind of a lot."

"Like what?"

I told him about telemetry and fallout and Dr. Martinez arguing with the vault council, and the only move he made was to sit cross-legged instead of folded up. Sometimes talking to Fang was irritating because he didn't say much back, but he made a good listener.

When I was done, he tilted his head to one side, then kicked a rock into the pool. A little songbird had come to drink while I was talking, and it fluttered away in surprise at the splash.

"So?" I said. "Do you want to go down in the vault, or stay here?"

"Actually," he said, "I want to show you something."

Fang rarely initiated lines of conversation, so I sat still while he reached into the backpack and withdrew a battered yellow pamphlet.

"The other day I went through all the desks in the complex looking for something to read. This is one of the things I found."

He opened it to a page spread with headings like **Next: Fallout starts descending **and **Group action: Community shelters.** The pages themselves were slightly wavy-edged from exposure to humidity.

He pointed to the left-hand page, just above an illustration of a cloud. "Dr. Martinez wants us to come inside because there are clouds of fallout, right?"

"Yeah." It was really a rhetorical question, but Fang preferred to have his rhetorical questions answered. Weird guy.

"This is about how long it takes fallout to fall to earth." He read aloud: " 'One hundred miles away the fallout may not start for four to six hours. All this early fallout descends in less than 24 hours.' It's been nearly a week and a half, and we're at least a thousand miles from the nearest impact site." He paused, his dark gaze searching my face for a response.

"So... you think if the fallout was going to reach us it already would've?" If I'd met Fang more recently, learning to read his nearly-invisible facial expressions would've been a major pain in the butt. But I'd grown up with him, and it was second nature to watch for the small lift in the inner corners of his eyebrows that meant he was pleased by my answer.

I liked having his approval. It meant I could trust him to back me up. When we agreed on a plan of action, he almost never deviated from it.

"Exactly." He handed me the pamphlet. "I think some of the information might be outdated, but I thought you'd appreciate having it."

I looked up a little in surprise. This was the closest he'd come to being the old Fang, my right-hand man, in days. I'd almost gotten used to him being not there for me, and it was nice to have a little of what we used to have back. "Thanks."

I skimmed the first few pages of the pamphlet - information about fallout, probably what Fang was most interested in showing me given what he knew I had talked about with Dr. Martinez. Most of it was things I already knew - radiation sickness wasn't contagious, some radioactive elements had longer half-lives than others - but one part gave me pause.

"Fang."

He turned his face back to me. "Yeah?"

"You think we should stay topside. This says that we're more at risk for harmful side effects from radiation if we do, because we're young."

He blinked slowly, shrugged. "I read some of the files on us from the School. We all have boosted healing abilities. I don't think radiation will be much of a problem for us."

He had a point.

He searched my face for a response, then continued, "Also, it says that as long as our exposure is low we won't get sick at all. And I think we're far enough from land that not much radiation will reach us."

"Do you think Dr. Martinez is playing up the possible effects of the fallout clouds to try and get us to come into the vault?" I knew for sure that she would much rather have us inside, but I didn't think she'd resort to underhanded manipulation.

He shook his head. "No. She wouldn't do that. I think she wants to play it safe. No one knows exactly how fallout works in the real world - they could never test on a large enough scale."

He looked away from me, into the forest.

"What else?"

"I don't know. The vault council... I don't think they want us to come into the vault at all. They might be scared of us." He picked up a pebble, bounced it in his hand a couple times, tossed it underhand into the pool.

I sat quietly. I couldn't be sure how long his good mood would last, but I knew that his analysis of the situation was probably solid. I'd gotten used to relying on him in that way while we were on the run, and it was weird not to be able to.

If I went down into the vault, I'd lose that. I could look at situations on my own, but he had a talent for that that I didn't. And we had different points of view. Seeing things through someone else's eyes helped a lot when I had to make decisions.

That all sounds really obvious, but I don't know how else to say it. Me and him had developed this sort of symbiotic relationship while working together.

Without him I wouldn't be nearly as efficient a leader. I knew I _could_ work on my own, but having his help... it made me a _better_ leader, for sure.

The other half of our family was down in that vault, though. And it worried me that Fang didn't seem bothered. We'd talked to them a couple times, but he didn't seem to miss them as much as I did. Not that he'd ever been really open about his emotions in the past _ever._

"If anyone would be lying to us, it'd be them." I almost asked him who, but then I remembered. The vault council, like we'd been talking about before I started thinking about me and him.

He tossed another pebble into the pool. "I don't think they could make Dr. Martinez lie to us, though."

I trusted his judgment on that, and not just because it agreed with my own assessment of Dr. Martinez. I glanced back down at the pamphlet. There was something I'd wanted to bring up to him, to get his opinion on.

It took me a minute to find it, and when I did his attention had already gone back to the trees. When I followed his gaze, he was watching a little songbird perched on a branch, preening its feathers.

I nudged him gently. "Thanks for the pamphlet, but I don't know if we should trust its information without reservations."

He went tense, but didn't lean away from me or turn from watching the trees. With Fang that meant he was wary, but interested.

"It says there's 'little hope in special medicines', and that's not true. We have some anti-radiation drugs in the first-aid kits."

He considered for a moment. "True. But that was based on the research they were doing then, and it's more than fifty years old. A lot has changed. I don't think that the physics of fallout in the upper atmosphere has changed."

"Good point."

We sat for a while, and a little breeze began to blow, breaking the stale feeling of the air.

The vault had arboretums and exercise rooms, bowling alleys and cinemas, even a library. It was designed for the worst-case scenario. You were supposed to be able to live down there comfortably for years.

But sitting here, I didn't think it was Fang's company that I wouldn't be able to give up.

It was all this. The breeze tickling my feathers, the sun that made me squint, the birds singing in the trees... even the freaking mosquitoes.

Even if it would be safer in the vault, I couldn't trade all this for spending the next few months or _years_ in a very big concrete box, even if there were other mutant kids there. And when I thought about it, I couldn't even be sure we'd be safer down there than up here - we were in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from most of the major impact sites. The amount of fallout that would reach us here would be negligible at best.

OK. Maybe I _did_ just want to live on an island like Fang had joked so long ago, and this was as close as I'd ever get.

When I thought about living in the vault, I only saw negatives, with very few positives. When I thought about staying up here, it was mostly positives, and a few possible negatives. The decision was obvious.

"Fang?"

"Yeah?"

"I think," I said, still testing the words out as I said them, "I want to stay up here, with you."

"With Dylan," he said without inflection.

"Fang, I thought we were done with arguing about Dylan." I really had. He hadn't said a word to me about Dylan since the first day here. "I don't really care if he stays up here or not. I don't mind having him around. He doesn't take up room or anything when we have this _whole island._"

I jabbed him hard in the ribs with my elbow and he whipped around to stare at me.

"Fang, _look at me._ I don't love Dylan. I don't want you to think I do and let that come between us." I felt a nervous sweat breaking out on my hands and the back of my neck. "Whatever he feels for me, that's not my problem, it's his."

It seemed like he was kind of looking past me. Fang's eyes are so dark that you can't always tell exactly where he's looking.

"Fang - I love _you_. And only you."

He blinked, and let out a breath. "I know, Max. I just don't know if Dylan knows."

I laughed. "No, I broke that to him a long time ago."

"In that case, you should probably go tell Dr. Martinez that you're planning to stay up here, so she knows that they won't need to have the decontamination team ready." He paused and added, "Also, that she should send up more anti-radiation drugs, in case we need them."

I stretched and got to my feet. "She said she wanted to talk to you too. Are you just gonna stay here?"

He looked off into the jungle one last time and stood up. "No. I'll come with you."

"I thought you would."

I kissed him.

* * *

_They have things like the atom bomb_

_So I think I'll stay where I am_

_Civilization?_

_I'll stay right here_

* * *

notes:

Lyrics are from "Civilization" by Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters. I'm coming off a long streak of writer's block, and using songs or other media to shape a piece seems to help drive that away.

There's never been a chipped beef MRE, but hey, since I'm already fudging physics...

The pamphlet is called "Fallout Protection: What To Know And Do About Nuclear Attack". The details it gives about fallout and protection from it were the inspiration for this fic.

Real-world fallout shelters were designed to be occupied full-time for weeks, not months or years. The vault described here is more in line with those in the Fallout series of video games, which were designed for long-term full-time occupancy.

The previous fic in this series is called "the ballad of the walking ghost". The running theme of the series is "watch me try to cudgel the ending of _Nevermore_ into making sense while simultaneously involving my obsession with Fallout and the Cold War".

Full disclosure, I didn't finish reading _Nevermore,_ but from what I can tell this is AU in that Angel is not on the surface.

I so rarely wrote Fang and Max as characters when I was last active in this fandom that I would _really_ appreciate input on how I did. I enjoy writing them, but I still feel like I'm fumbling in the dark.


End file.
